We meet Sue at a fundraiser. Her husband is trying to raise money for the local hospital and they're wining and dining a bunch of rich folks. One rich gentleman eyes Sue from across the room. They meet up at the bar and both order martinis. They flirt but they're both married. That doesn't stop Rick from planting a wet one on Sue when no one's looking. They kiss by some vines. Sue keeps one of the vine leaves as a souvenir because she is pretty obviously crazy.

Rick calls up Sue a few days later while their hubbies are at work and they bone at a motel. Sue then steals Rick's Zippo because, again, the crazy.

Sue continues the affair with Rick as her home life starts falling apart. She only has a part-time job and she is failing at her womanly duties. This is made clear when Sue misses a job interview and Sue's husband complains that the cooking and cleaning aren't being done. Lifetime is painting the husband as the bad guy.

Now, demanding that a wife cook and clean is, uh, not acceptable. However, when the house is falling apart and, theoretically, the little missus should be home or at job interviews, if she's at neither, it raises some questions, doesn't it?

The husband goes away for a week on business. This drives Sue mad because she has some pretty severe abandonment issues. She needs to call her husband every day to make him promise that he's coming back. More crazy!

At this point, Sue is head over heels for Rick. So much so that she violates rule number one of having an illicit affair and shows up at his family's house and meets the wife and kid. Rick, shockingly, doesn't take too kindly to this and Sue freaks out. She puts on her sexiest lingerie (which she keeps in a secret drawer!) and her sexiest perfume (which she compulsively sniffs when she's feeling down) and goes to a dive bar. One mustachioed dude offers her a cigarette andBAM, it's a one way train to Sex Town.

To complicate things further, Sue starts sleeping with a new client at her part-time job. He's French and mysterious. He tells her that free will is a dream and a bunch of other gobbely-gook designed to get her in the sack. She resists but acquiesces to his sexy demands when, on the first date, he promises to marry her and take away the pain behind her eyes.

Sue foolishly tells her best friend of this plan and she isn't buying it. The friend gives Sue a shrink's business card.

Sue runs into Frenchy at a bar where she meets his wife. Frenchy awesomely pretends to not know Sue's name. This starts a nervous breakdown and she calls her friend for help. The friend and her husband come to her house to check on her and Sue thanks them by trying to sleep with the husband. This fails. To the shrink we go!

Oh, somewhere in this mess Sue goes to her parents' 35th anniversary party. At least she doesn't have daddy issues.

Jay kay! Her dad had been fucking her on the regular for her entire childhood and adolescence. He even called Sue his "real wife." And they say romance is dead. Sue tells her shrink that she would be naked during these molestations save for a scarf that her dad bought her. The worst part? She still has the fucking scarf (and I do mean that...it is a scarf that was used during fucking). And she smells it when she is feeling depressed! Gak!

The shrink tells Sue that's she's a sex addict and that he can't help her until she's sober. So, she decides to go to a 28 day sexless boot camp for women. All right! Now we're talking. The natural progression of the plot leads to sexy pillow fights. There is no other option, right?

Before going away, she tells her husband that she has a problem and she needs to get it fixed. The cuckolded husband tells her in no uncertain terms that he could give a fuck about her. Well played, sir. She also has one last goodbye fuck with Rick who takes the opportunity to take Polaroids of Sue in her underwear to remember her by. Tellingly, the photos cropped out her head leaving just some ta-tas and a hoo-ha. Sue is having sex at the expense of her humanity!

So, sexless boot camp. There is an obvious lack of pillow fighting. It's just people talking about their problems and shit. Argh. Sue develops the courage to not use sex as a crutch. This is proven when a chiseled dreadlocked orderly tries to bone her and she refuses. Huzzah.

The desk in her room at the clinic has a few notes that previous sex addicts have written on the wood. Sue writes "Love surrounds us everyday." This is notable because Sue is supposed to be a fucking writer. It's "Love surrounds us every day."

(Note, I am also supposed to be a writer and I make that mistake constantly. Terri, my silent editor, fixes this for me.)

The film ends with Sue at a book reading. She is sharing her battle with sex addiction with the world as her therapist observes glowingly.

ACTUAL AWESOMENESS: 3

I hate the beginning of this film. I don't know if you caught this, but the movie didn't have much in the way of a plot. Sue just sleeps with people and 90 minutes in decides to get help. Boring.

Some of the bit actors, namely Rick's wife and Sue's rapey dad, were just brutal. But I guess that's all part of the fun.

IRONIC AWESOMENESS: 8

But, when Sue starts going off the rails, it's a fun thing to watch. The awkward horror of finding your mistress, wife, and kid having a cocktail when you come home from work? Fantastic. And the incest angle? Brilliant.

This is admittedly sick, but I think incest has been sapped of all its shock and horror by Larry David. I don't mean in real life. Just in movies and television. I can't watch a woman baring this horrible secret without thinking of this:

HEY! IT'S THAT GUY!: 0

Epic fail in that regard. Sue was played by some lady from that Lifetime show Army Wives. Rick was played by a guy from JAG. I recognized no one.

LIFETIMENESS: 9

So we have a woman who is crazy and is ruining the lives of many, many people. Naturally, this can be blamed on men. The father is one thing. But the husband? Did they really have to portray him as such an asshole? His wife had been sleeping with the entire town and, on top of that, she kept an untidy house.

GRAND TOTAL: 20.

A mediocre film with some hilarious bright spots. Since this one stars a Lifetime actress, it will probably be on again sometime soon. If you have two hours to kill, why not?

4 comments:

I just caught this movie this weekend. I absolutely loved the scene in which she calls her parents from rehab. She's all, "mom, dad, I'm in rehab." They don't even attempt to ascertain what she is rehabbing over -- her father immediately begins questioning the sanity of the people who work there (rightly so, I suppose, given that creepy orderly). Then both he and the mother must hang up because his food needs salt, and salting food is obviously a two-person job.